Alan Johnson is the Editor of Fathom: for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region and Senior Research Fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). A professor of democratic theory and practice, he is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine, and a Senior Research Associate at The Foreign Policy Centre.

The ugly history of the Apartheid Smear

The idea that Israel is an "apartheid state" is the shaky intellectual foundation of the global movement to boycott, divest from and sanction the Jewish homeland (BDS). In The Apartheid Smear, a new pamphlet out today, I try to show that the comparison of Israel with racist apartheid-era South Africa is a malicious lie that does huge damage to the central goal of the peace process: the creation through negotiation of two states for two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian.

Readers can judge my argument by reading the pamphlet. In brief, I claim Israel within the Green Line is a multi-ethnic democracy in which every citizen is guaranteed equal rights under the law; while beyond the Green Line, Israel’s security policies are best understood as the tragic and temporary response to the failure of repeated peace negotiations and the terrible reality of terrorism, and not as an Israeli intent to rule over the Palestinians as superiors holding down inferior helots, apartheid style.

Here, I want to say something about the revealing historical background to the apartheid smear. There have been three key moments. Each – whatever the sincere hopes of many of its supporters – was a cynical attempt to demonise Israel as a pariah state in order to prepare the ground for its eventual destruction.

The smear originated in "anti-Zionist" campaigns that were waged without let up by the Communist states during the Cold War. Seeking Arab allies, these campaigns frequently descended into antisemitism, the word "Zionist" understood by all as a fig-leaf for "Jew". Many ideas that have since spread around the world, especially amongst "progressives", began here: Zionism equals racism, Zionism equals imperialism. Israel is the USA's "watchdog" in the Middle East, Zionism is complicit with, or even promotes, antisemitism, and, of course, Zionism equals South African apartheid.

It is hard to overstate how corrosive these ideas were to liberal intellectual culture in the West. For example, in 1975 an official publication of the communist Ukrainian state, in Zionism and Apartheid, claimed that Israel shared with South Africa a "racial biological doctrine" based on the idea of a "chosen people" versus an inferior people. Fellow travellers of the communists produced a stream of books in this period that circulated widely in Western universities and often demonised Israel and Zionism. For example, Zionism, Imperialism and Racism, edited by AW Kayyali in 1979, included a chapter by Fayez Sayegh which claimed that "This century has witnessed three perfect racisms: Aryan or Nazi racism, Zionism racism and Apartheid Racism". (I cut my teeth in student politics in the 1980s resisting attempts by the Socialist Workers Party, and others, to ban campus Jewish societies. Yes, really.)

The smear got a huge boost in 1975 when a coalition between the Soviet Bloc, the authoritarian Arab states, and the so-called "Non-Aligned Movement" used its built-in majority at the UN General Assembly to pass Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism. (The UN rescinded the resolution in 1991.)

The third key moment in the growth of the Apartheid Smear came in 2001 with the failure of the Camp David peace talks. This gave the smear an opening which was seized by tightly-organised, politically motivated and well-resourced group of NGOs and anti-Israel activists who hijacked the UN’s World Conference against Racism, Racial Intolerance and Xenophobia in Durban, South Africa to launch a global campaign against Israel as a "racist, apartheid state" and Israel itself as a "crime against humanity".

South Africa’s then Deputy Foreign Minister, Aziz Pahad, was appalled: "I wish to make it unequivocally clear that the SA government recognises that … [the Durban Conference] was hijacked and used by some with an anti-Israel agenda to turn into an antisemitic event."

The event was marked by hate speech. Pamphlets were circulated filled with grotesque caricatures of hook-nosed Jews depicted as Nazis, spearing Palestinian children, dripping blood from their fangs, with missiles bulging from their eyes or with pots of money nearby. In a Palestinian-led march with thousands of participants, a placard was held aloft that read ‘Hitler Should Have Finished the Job.’ Nearby, someone was selling the most notorious of anti-Jewish tracts, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a forgery which purports to be the minutes of a world Jewish Conspiracy, and which has been called a ‘warrant for genocide’.

Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said ‘There was horrible antisemitism present — particularly in some of the NGO discussions. A number people said they've never been so hurt or so harassed or been so blatantly faced with an antisemitism.’

Such is the history of the apartheid smear.

Politicians who stay silent when the smear is aired in parliament have a duty to find their voice and protest. Enough of letting it slide. The smear damages hopes for peace by encouraging extremists and demoralising moderates. It fosters political polarisation, eroding the chances of compromise, mutual recognition and reconciliation. And it fosters a destructive ‘smear and boycott activism’ here in the West, consuming energies that could be invested in something more constructive: a politics that is pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli, pro-peace. Time to call time on the apartheid smear.